Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 17, 1969. The screenplay (co-written with Mazursky’s regular collaborator Larry Tucker) won top honors from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics; Quincy Jones did the music and veteran cinematographer…
“My romantic idea is to be part of an American New Wave,” Francis Ford Coppola told an interviewer in 1972, perhaps defensively in the wake of the monumental, mainstream success of The Godfather. And as if to prove the point, his next film would be the beyond-uncompromising New Hollywood masterpiece The Conversation (his price for…
It is very 1969 out there this summer, with anniversaries of touching the moon (that’s a Dylan reference) and the Woodstock Festival, as well as what one friend perfectly described as the “immersive experience” of the time capsule visit to EL-Lay ‘69 that is Quinten Tarantino’s current release. Naturally all this led us to thinking…
June 18, 1969 marked another milestone moment for the still-emerging New Hollywood, with the premiere of Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist western The Wild Bunch. It was something of a comeback for the veteran director, a hard-drinking ex-marine with an unpredictable, combative personality, who made a career of battling studio bosses (and alienated enough of them that…
Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates and starring Steve McQueen, premiered on October 17, 1968. A much beloved film that invariably brings a smile to the face of its enthusiasts—mostly for its legendary car chase. It lasts over ten minutes! Steve McQueen did much of his own dangerous high-speed driving! That streets-of-San-Francisco sequence (the big hills…
Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Shame had its premiere on September 29, 1968. In the U.S., the National Society of Film Critics would name it the best film of the year, and Liv Ullmann as best actress. A visceral film about a terrifying war with harrowing action on-screen, it is unlike any other Bergman film, in both…
Petulia, a relatively overlooked New Hollywood gem, had its premiere on June 10, 1968. Shot on location in San Francisco, the film, diving into the sexual revolution, could be mistaken today for a period piece/counterculture curio. And certainly it is of that time and place: the production features performances by Bay Area locals Janis Joplin…
The 1968 Cannes Film Festival opened on May 10 for what was supposed to be a two week run, with twenty-eight films screening in competition. It only made it through eight days and eleven of those entries, before shutting down on May 18. Jury President Louis Malle, along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (with…
Claude Chabrol’s first “comeback” film, Les Biches, opened on March 22, 1968. One of our favorite directors here at Mid Century Cinema (dedicated subscribers will recall that we’ve written about him repeatedly, with our top ten list, some words about The Line of Demarcation (a notable obscurity), an essay about that astonishing run of films…
One of the great Americans of the 1970s, Lieutenant Columbo, made his first television appearance on February 20, 1968, in the made-for-TV movie “Prescription Murder.” Sure, he was a tad disheveled, and didn’t have a first name—but his understated intelligence, basic decency, and indelible but lightly-worn second-generation ethnicity made him an exemplar of the best…